Award Contenders

   Fifteen years ago, the Academy Awards failed to properly recognize what has been called one of the greatest films of that decade, the documentary Hoop Dreams.  The amazing, true life story of two boys singled out for their basketball skills at a young age and groomed for what seemed to be long careers in the pro ranks, was recently named by the International Documentary Association as the best documentary in film history.  Film critic Roger Ebert named the movie the best film of 1994 — ahead of such landmarks as Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, and The Shawshank Redemption — and later named it the greatest film of the decade.  Certainly, a film with such high praise would have been nominated for Best Documentary, even though it didn’t win, right?  Sadly, that was not the case; Hoop Dreams was not even nominated for Best Documentary.

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   In the late 1980s, director Steve James began filming kids playing basketball for a potential short feature that would air on PBS.  After the filmmaker decided to see what kind of footage he could gather if he followed the kids back to their homes to chronicle their stories “off the court”, what was initially going to be a minor project transformed into five years and over 250 hours of footage.  The finished product, a nearly three hour documentary feature film, follows two Illinois teenagers from the inner city (William Gates and Arthur Agee) who are recruited to play basketball at a prestigious basketball program in an upper class neighborhood ninety minutes away.  The film is just as much about life as it is about basketball, following the boys and their families with a flow that seems even more touching and gripping than scripted, fictional sports dramas.

   But why was what seems to be such a classic film snubbed when it came to the Oscars?  The generally accepted view seems to be that the documentary film community at the time was a very close knit group that preferred to remain as an exclusive club of sorts; the connections between filmmakers and those on the nomination committee were quite strong, and it was felt that these upstart filmmakers and their “basketball movie” did not deserve the recognition.  And, though it was not even nominated for Best Documentary, the public outcry that followed did lead to major changes in the way that documentary films are nominated for the Academy Awards.

   With yet another new film joining the ranks of the Oscar winners for Best Documentary, realize that it might be due to the groundbreaking changes that took place after one of the biggest snubs in Academy Awards history fifteen years ago that the proper films are now being recognized.